Step into the roots of popular football

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It’s been a long time that I wanted to meet our comrades from Quartograd, and discover their passion for popular football. Remember last season when my group, PHK04 – Standard Liege, displayed a banner to support Quartograd in their fight against mafia.
Thanks to Alfonso -Quartograd member working in Brussels-, I had now the chance to visit our comrades and learn about their love of football.
As expected, I directly felt home when I arrived at the train station of Napoli. My contacts; Ornella and Marco came to take me and we went together back to the city of Quarto, a peaceful municipality of 45.000 inhabitants located in the north-west of Napoli.

My new friends drove me straight to the stadium because the junior team had its first training of the season. There I’ve met the president and also the coach of the junior team, Davide and Enrico. After a couple of beers synonym of ice-breaker we started talking about our teams, our passion, our ideas, and our differences.

It was a great chance to discover how a popular team is managed. Everybody in the club has the same mentality, from the fans to the players and team members. The team of Quartograd is moving on and evolving over time. Step by step, it raised to higher divisions and became the first (and only) team of the city. The main challenge for the new season is to achieve to manage the stadium itself without being under the municipality control. Unfortunately, the mayor and politics are not helping in that process.

After a long night spent discovering typical food and (of course) alcoholic beverages, we visited the colorful city of Napoli and all its beautiful streets and monuments, but also its historical stadium.

I grew up in Liege and even if we are fighting racism in the stadium -which is not obvious in our stadium and generally in Belgian stadiums the last years-, our main fight became the one against the football business and repression. During this short visit of Quarto, I’ve met really interesting people and learned what is the real popular football. We should inspire ourself from them, not only Quartograd, all of those popular teams based on the FC United of Manchester model, growing up in Italy, in Spain, in France, and so on. Another football is possible, the football of the people, the football of the crowds, the football that we love.

“ We are all together, all the same, players, supporters and managers. Our players are militants of the people’s football, we are against this corrupted and rotten Modern football, well represented bu the Fifa. Our players pay their quota to be in the team, because it’s also their team, and this is our strength: our players do not play for money, they believe in this project, and for this reason we will go far.”Davide, ASD Quartograd President